A popular post on Tumblr (over 150,000 notes) makes the claim that:
yall realize the average lifespan for a trans woman is 30-32 years.. and that is largely because of hate crimes resulting in murder..
Is this claim true?
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Sign up to join this communityA popular post on Tumblr (over 150,000 notes) makes the claim that:
yall realize the average lifespan for a trans woman is 30-32 years.. and that is largely because of hate crimes resulting in murder..
Is this claim true?
This seems implausible.
It's estimated that about .2 to .3% of the population are trans.
http://www.livescience.com/50635-bruce-jenner-transgender-prevalence.html
The most frequently cited estimate is that 700,000 people in the United States, or about 0.2 to 0.3 percent of the population, are transgender, though some experts say the true number is probably greater than that. However, there aren't reliable statistics on this, because neither the U.S. Census Bureau nor the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ask people in national surveys whether they identify themselves as being a gender different from the one indicated by their physical features at birth.
Apparently there's more trans women than trans men but we can assume it's >50% of that number.
We could limit it to post-operative transsexual women
there are at least 32,000 to 40,000 post-operative transsexual women in the United States
Homicide in the US doesn't appear to make a significant dent.
The Human Rights Campaign report documented 21 transgender homicide victims so far in 2015, almost all of them transgender women of color, and likely an underestimate due to the difficulty of tracking the homicides. Among all 53 transgender murders from 2013 to 2015, not a single one was prosecuted or reported as a hate crime, the report found.
A few dozen murders per year in a community of tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands just isn't enough to knock life expectancy down that much.
In an utterly randomly selected group of 1 million americans we'd expect ~53 murders per year. So the Human Rights Campaign figures for trans murders are almost certainly an underestimate but it seems likely that they're not too many orders of magnitude off.
So the claim "and that is largely because of hate crimes resulting in murder.. " is almost certainly false.
it does appear that trans women have a lower life expectancy for various other reasons including the effects of hormone therapy causing higher risk of heart disease.
Trans individuals are also far more likely to commit suicide or to die from various other health problems.